CompactPCI and AdvancedTCA Systems - OpenSystems Media

2. Global walking: Communicationsand diagnostics among various nodepoints within the system.3. Message service: Messaging betweencomponents within a system.4. Event distribution: Failure ormanagement events, what constitutesan event and when it occurs, whogets notified, and how are theynotified.5. Checkpointing service:Checkpointing at certain phaseswithin a task and if errors occur, rollback and relaunch of the task fromthe checkpoint.From a telecom perspective, some ofthese services are enterprise-centric andtoo simplistic. Developers are now addingmessage-based distribution, system management,and logging capabilities, as wellas security that figure much more importantlyfor telecom. Everything will nowbe backward-compatible from the olderspecifications. So, now a critical mass ofservices has emerged that can be adoptedas a high availability system.Q. What plans does Motorola have withrespect to AIS?A. Motorola is actively developing anapplication interface library and plansto integrate it into our AdvancedTCAapplication enabling platform. Also, weplan to work with third-party platformproviders to implement on their platformsas well. The HA software and AIS productswill be our own unique products.In addition, Motorola plans to port theapplication interface library to other systemsof partners that make a good strategicfit for us. The end benefit from thisactivity is portability for applications thatperform high availability tasks within asystem.Q. What kind of interest are you seeingin using AIS specs?A. Oracle and VERITAS have joined andare seeking a way to incorporate the AISspecifications I mentioned earlier intotheir applications. Motorola and the SAForum are also looking into Java-basedalternatives. Since Java is quickly becominga ubiquitous part of Internet programming,integrating AIS services, either asa Java class or native method, opens uphigh availability services for just aboutevery application connecting with theInternet.and Army mandate high availability withstandard form factor solutions. Many ofthe same attributes of streamlining supplychain coupled with high availabilityin telecom are also attractive for defenseapplications.Significant interest also exists in the highavailability SA Forum product beingdeveloped. We originally estimated onedesign win this year with significantdesign win activity in 2006, but we’rewell ahead of 2005 projections.Motorola ECC is changing to meet theneeds of the telecom industry. Likewise,Motorola ECC headcount seems to alsobe tracking this change. Currently, Johnestimates the ratio of hardware to softwareengineers being 60/40. Softwarehead count could reach the point wherethe 60/40 ratio could flip in favor of softwareengineering over the next few years.Boards and platforms are still an importantpiece of the Motorola solution. However,software capabilities are the key ingredientto serving the needs of capturing newbusiness in the telecom industry.For further information, contact Curt bye-mail at cschwaderer@opensystemspublishing.com.We’re also seeing some activity indefense and aerospace, where the NavyRSC# 13 @www.compactpci-systems.com/rscCompactPCI and AdvancedTCA Systems / June 2005 / 13